Uncorrected Personality Traits

There comes a moment in every parent's life when you worry that some small misstep--caving in to demands for a supermarket toy, snapping at your kid when he clings to you at daycare--has become a pattern that will inflict irreversible psychological harm on your child.

You can't forsee it now, while he's still cute and seemingly well-adjusted.

But the damage is there, festering in his psyche, lurking in his subconcious. One day when he's an adult, it will emerge. He'll be depressed, or anxious, or unable to form close relationships, or hold a job, or resist the urge to shoplift, or lie compulsively or murder people he doesn't like.

Inevitably, his shrink will trace everything back to you.

British rocker Robyn Hitchock captures this dread in his surrealy funny 1984 song "Uncorrected Personality Traits.''

Sung a capella with his group, the Egyptians, it sounds like a cross between a Gregorian chant and a pub song, perfromed by a barbershop quartet.

Except the lyrics are filled with fatalistic psychobabble. (You can listen to a snippet here).

It begins: "Uncorrected personality traits/that seem whimsical in a child/might prove to be ugly in a fully grown adult.''

Hitchock's parenting advice? "If you give into them/Every time they cry/They will become little tyrants/But they won''t remember why/And when they are thwarted/By people in later life/They will become psychotic/And they won't make an ideal husband or wife.''

"Uncorrected Personality Traits'' always makes me laugh. But the other day, it made me think of a book written by Lionel Dahmer, father of the notorious serial killer Jeffrey.

Called "A Father's Story,'' it recounts Lionel' horrified incomprehension that his unhappy loner son wound up a flesh-eating necrophile.

Why? the father agonizes. Could he have prevented it? In the book, there are pictures of little Jeffrey, a cherubic tow-headed baby, loved by his flawed mom and dad. It's heart-breaking to look at them, knowing what will happen.

Lionel gropes for answers, from psychiatrists, from his own childhood, but in the end, he can find no real explaination.

There were uncorrected personality traits. But he couldn't see what they were. And by the time he finally could, it was too late.